Network, Networking Technology, Data Communication Terms, Glossary and Dictionary

8-bit clean

8-bit clean ("Eight-bit clean") describes a computer system that deals correctly with extended character sets which (unlike ASCII) use all eight bits of a byte, such as the ISO 8859 series and the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode. Up to the early 1990s, many programs and communications systems used to assume that all characters have codes in the range of 0 to 127. This leaves the top bit of each byte free for use as a parity bit or some kind of flag bit. These assumptions make such systems unusable on text data that contains characters with higher character codes, which is commonplace in non-English-speaking countries with larger alphabets.

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8-bit clean